Tag Archive for ‘Don’t Know Much About Literature’
TODAY IN HISTORY: The “Negro Riots” in Watts
It started with a “DWB”– “driving while black.” On August 11, 1965, an all-too-frequent stop of a young black man exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history. Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing [...]
TODAY IN HISTORY: Don’t Know Much About® Tocqueville in America
Happy Birthday, Monsieur Tocqueville (born July 29, 1805; died April 16, 1859) Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final [...]
Don’t Know Much About® “Papa”
Ernest Hemingway, the larger-than-life American novelist, was born on July 21 in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. They called him “Papa.” One of America’s most successful and admired novelists, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) once compared his bare-bones style to an iceberg: “There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.” Beneath Hemingway’s famously [...]
Happy Bloomsday!
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. . .” With those words, James Joyce (February 2, 1882-January 13, 1941) opened Ulysses, chosen in 1999 as the greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. The novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on their wanderings through Dublin on a single day –June 16 1904. Hence, today [...]
Happy “Frost Day”
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874. Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost [...]
Don’t Know Much About Jack Kerouac
Lots of people, including Bob Dylan, say he changed their lives. Born this date, March 12, in 1922, Jack Kerouac.
Seuss Day!
If your book was turned down by more than 40 publishers, “what would you do?” Become Dr. Seuss?
Don’t Know Much About John Steinbeck
Born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California in 1902, was a writer I consider a major personal influence.
John Steinbeck built his reputation writing about the struggles of down-and-out people: Dust Bowl farmers and pearl divers, prostitutes, jobless migrants, and Depression-era hobos.
“He told the truth, mainly.” –Huck Finn
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. –Notice at the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn America doesn’t have a national holiday to honor a writer. But if [...]
Don’t Know Much About Edith Wharton
Born today in New York City in 1862: Edith Newbold Jones, who achieved fame as Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction
